Double Crossword
13 LS 112 minutes
IN INDIGNATION, James Schamus’s adaptation of the 2008 novel by Philip Roth, Logan Lerman plays Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher in Newark who, in 1951, escapes the Korean War and the overprotective clutches of his parents (Emond and Burstein) to attend Winesburg College in Ohio.
That nod towards Sherwood Anderson is purely intentional in a story of cultural displacement, sexual awakening and, finally, cruel irony that, for all its fealty to Roth’s setting and characters, feels at a cautious arm’s length from the bristling emotion of the title. An Angry Young Man in embryo, Marcus is a straight-A student who intends to go to law school, largely keeping to himself when he spies the flirtatiously dangling leg of a fellow student, Olivia (Gadon). Troubled and far more sexually experienced than Marcus, Olivia exudes the blondeshiksa-goddess perfection of Eva Marie Saint. Except she’s a sinner, and a coolly unapologetic one, which leaves Marcus in a muddle of bemused moral offence on the one hand, and dizzying attraction on the other.
Schamus makes his directorial debut with Indignation, for which he also wrote the screenplay, and approaches the material with careful, almost fetishistic deliberation, a style that befits the 1950s backdrop, while lulling the audience into a sense of security before the final, agonising twist.
Lerman makes a reasonably convincing, but emotionally blank Marcus, whose expression conveys tentative apprehension more than spiky selfrighteousness.
The best scene in Indignation – when Marcus, high on atheism and Bertrand Russell, embarks on a prolonged philosophical thrustand-parry with the college dean, played by Letts – is staged like a polite, ever-sorestrained set piece, instead of the aria that its climactic placement justifies.
Rather than take the audience inside Marcus’s world, Indignation is content to show it to us, in an episodic narrative in which, as Marcus’s worried father insists, even “the tiniest mistake can have consequences”.
The beauty of Indignation can be found in how it grows from a garden-variety coming-of-age story into a meditation on the pitiless vagaries of character and regret.
Thoughtful and reserved, perhaps even to a fault, it packs a wallop far greater than its modest parts might suggest. – The Washington Post If you liked Cafe Society or the Human Stain, you will like this.